The Annals of Iowa
Volume 47 | Number 5 (Summer 1984)
pps. 476-478
Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri
ISSN 0003-4827
Copyright © 1984 State Historical Society of Iowa. This article is posted here for personal use, not
for redistribution.
Recommended Citation
"Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri." The Annals of Iowa 47 (1984), 476-478.
Available at: http://ir.uiowa.edu/annals-of-iowa/vol47/iss5/6
Hosted by Iowa Research Online
THE ANNALS OF IOWA
well researched and well crafted. Facts and figures are woven
throughout the text. Yet the events and little known details that make
up Childs's tale are wholly undocumented. There is no bibliography,
no essay on sources, and no footnotes. This is particularly vexing
because the reader is intrigued by the events enough to want to know
more. With no footnotes or sources, there is no direction given.
Mighty Mississippi paints a panorama of river history—deerskins
down the Mississippi, floating debris from an exploded steamboat,
and government towboats pushing barges down "Government River."
Childs originally left off at the point in 1935 when "the federal government . . . stepped in to try and master the Mississippi. . . . " Now,
forty-seven years later, Childs has added a brief closing to a 1935
manuscript that does not attempt to fill in the history of four decades
but rather describes the political football game played in Washington
with the Mississippi as the pigskin.
Mighty Mississippi is a well-written, factual, yet dramatic tale of
the greatest of American rivers, written in the thirties and revealed to
us for the first time in the eighties.
DUBUQUE COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY
JEROME A. ENZLER
Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri, by James Neal Primm.
Boulder, Colorado: Pruett Publishing Company, 1981. pp. viii, 546.
Illustrations, photographs, notes on the sources, index. $19.95 cloth.
St. Louis deserves its label, "Gateway to the West." In February 1764,
workmen led by Pierre de Laclède began to build the city following a
pattern similar to New Orleans. The community was an important ingredient in the international rivalry for control of the Mississippi
River Valley in the late eighteenth and first decade of the nineteenth
century. Oriented westward from its early history, St. Louis maintained a French character while it served as "imperial Spain's
borderland capital, the hub of the Missouri River trade, the place of
contact with the powerful and capricious Plains tribes, and a key location in the competition with Great Britain" (38). There seems to have
been neither a great outcry against nor much enthusiasm expressed for
American control following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.
James Neal Primm, a Missouri native, professor of history at the
University of Missouri—St. Louis, and author of several volumes related to the state's history, offers a lengthy, strictly chronological narrative history of St. Louis. Beginning with the pre-Columbian moundbuilders who lived in "orderly, sophisticated urbanized" settlements,
he carries the story through the 1970s, while concentrating on the
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Book Reviews
period of American control. In the early nineteenth century St. Louis
directly benefited from various economic activities in the transMississippi West, most notably the Rocky Mountains fur trade, commerce along the Santa Fe Trail, and expanded operations of the United
States Army. When steamboats began to dominate river travel in the
1830s, the city's merchandising became even more varied. This
growth attracted numerous immigrants, especially Germans and Irish.
But they were hit hard by a cholera epidemic in 1849 and by KnowNothing nativist riots five years later. Although it was a busy slave
market in the 1850s, Missouri remained in the Union during the Civil
War; during this time St. Louis lost most of the Upper Mississippi Valley trade to its principal rival, Chicago. In the last decades of the century the city remained an important distribution center and a growing
manufacturing outlet for flour milling, sugar refining, meatpacking,
brewing, and distilling.
Despite the highly successful 1904 World's Fair, St. Louis faced
serious problems in the present century. An influx of southern blacks
during and following World War I led to housing segregation and a
bloody race riot in July 1917. The author tries to counteract a local
myth that the city's diversified economy made the Great Depression
less severe. The 1940 United States census depicted a population decline for the first time as residents began to migrate to the suburbs.
Since the city was politically separated from the county, St. Louis
became "by far the smallest of any important American city" (509).
This government rivalry was exemplified most recently in the still controversial issue of constructing a regional airport. In spite of a
century-old problem with air pollution and a public housing experience that included the disaster at Pruitt-Igoe, city leaders attempted to
reestablish citizen pride and economic vitality along the riverfront. In
October 1965 the Eero Saarinen-designed Gateway Arch was completed as a visible symbol of past history and future possibilities. Although the author demonstrates that by the 1970s the city was well
served educationally and culturally, he concludes that substantial
black unemployment, a high crime rate, and a "restrictive, suffocating" city charter made the quality of St. Louis' future seem only marginally favorable.
This book is part of the publisher's Western Urban History Series;
other volumes have studied Denver, Kansas City, and Omaha. James
Primm presents a very detailed account of more than two hundred
years of St. Louis history. He focuses primarily on political and economic developments and pays little attention to intellectual and literary life, the women's movement, or recent labor and union impact. If
special emphasis is present, it is placed on selected prominent individ477
THE ANNALS OF IOWA
uals and specific events. These include lengthy portraits of Thomas
Hart Benton, Francis P. Blair, Claiborne F. Jackson, John O'Fallon,
Rolla Wells, construction of the Eads Bridge, and the 1904 World's
Fair. Unfortunately the author's research effort, readable text, and obvious interest in and concern for the city offer little to the western or
the urban historian. No effort is made to broaden the perspective
beyond the city limits. How did St. Louis affect the growth or
dominate the politics of Missouri? How did the city fit into patterns
established in other western cities or into a broader urban historiography? The bibliography includes a cursory summary of secondary sources and concentrates on listing articles in the Missouri
Historical Review and the Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society
and theses and dissertations from local universities. The book should
attract the interest of local residents who can appreciate the detail of
fact and location; that somewhat limited audience is well served.
UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN IOWA
DAVID A. WALKER
A History of Manufactures in the Ohio Valley to the Year 1860, by
Isaac Lippincott. 1914. Reprint. Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1974.
pp. vii, 214. Bibliography, index. $15.00 cloth.
This Porcupine Press reissue of Lippincott's 1914 work offers the
reader an intelligent treatment of the economic development of the
trans-Allegheny West and a version of the "old" economic history as
practiced before World War I. These two features combined with a
low price tag make this volume a worthy acquisition for libraries with
a suitable collecting interest.
Lippincott divides the "industrial" history of the Ohio Valley into
three parts. The first, more or less coincidental to French occupation,
was largely devoted to the initial preparation of furs for export.
English occupation after 1763, and American control after the Revolution, changed little. The years 1790 to 1830, which Lippincott calls the
"Pioneer Period," were marked by the widespread establishment of
small manufacturing firms, primarily involved in processing corn into
meal and whiskey. The third phase covered 1830 to 1860, a time
characterized by Lippincott as the "Mill Period." As the name suggests, the dominant type of manufacturing enterprise was the mill,
usually run by water, but with increasing numbers of steam-powered
mills. Lumber and flour mills were the most common, though Lippincott does pay some attention to Pittsburgh's growing iron industry, as
well as the meatpacking business of Cincinnati.
Lippincott shows himself to be a follower of Frederick Jackson
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